LEAGOO S9 was one of the early Android smartphones that embraced notch on its display to fully utilized the screen. The LEAGOO S9 was showcased at Mobile World Congress early this year.

Finally, LEAGOO Malaysia has made the move to bring in the LEAGOO S9 and they also sent us a review unit.

There won’t be any unboxing as we only received the device without packaging. Let’s go straight to the design.

Design

My first impression, the S9 is heavily inspired by the Apple iPhone X, the notch cutout, and vertical position dual rear camera system.

The rear case is made out of glossy plastic giving an impression of a premium glass. The built are pretty solid and doesn’t have much sharp corners or edges.

The fingerprint scanner is located on the rear above the LEAGOO branding. The device doesn’t only unlock with the rear fingerprint scanner, it also supported Face Unlock out-of-the-box.

Screen

It equipped with a 5.85-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1,512 x 720. The LEAGOO S9 has a narrow side bezel and a decent chin size translated it into 78.54% screen-to-body ratio. With the high screen-to-body ratio, the device has a smaller footprint compare it to a conventional 5.5-inch phone.

With a notch on the top of the display, not all applications are able to take advantage of the full-screen display. For an example, YouTube, Google Chrome, Google Maps and much more.

The display is bright, decently sharp and has pretty good wide viewing angles.

Performance

Under the hood is the MediaTek MT6750 processor based on 28nm process chip, mated with 4GB of RAM and 32GB onboard storage. The storage can be further expanded via 2nd SIM hybrid slot.

The 28nm process SoC is just average in term of processing power and power efficiency. It able to handle most of the daily task applications like Facebook, Email, Instagram and medium gaming. To my surprise, PUBG Mobile is not compatible with the device. We suspected its due to GPU limitation. Garena Free Fire and Asphalt 8 work perfectly fine.

The LEAGOO S9 run on almost pure Android 8.1 Oreo without much bloatware. The overall user experiences are pretty intuitive and familiar.

Cameras

It features a dual rear camera system equipped with a 13-megapixel SONY sensor plus a 2-megapixel secondary sensor that works as a depth sensor. To be honest, the secondary camera seems doesn’t work as per advertised. There is no edge detection when we shoot in SLR mode that supposedly blurred out the background of a portrait shot. We even tried to cover the secondary camera to test, the output is pretty much the same.

When we dig in further, AnTuTu benchmark tools are only able to recognize a single 13-megapixel rear camera sensor.

Shooting with just the main camera is pretty decent but the colors are a bit washed out. Sometimes it struggled to focus well in low light environments and output with a lot of noises.

The front camera is an 8-megapixel sensor that shoots decently well photos and adequate for video calls. Beautification mode is kinna too much and fake even after tuned down to minimum.

Below are some sample photos taken with the LEAGOO S9 without any post-processing;
(click on the image for high-resolution viewing)

Battery

The MediaTek MT6750 is not really that power efficient but with the 3,300, the device able to last a full day use with around 4 hours SOT (Screen-on-Time). It uses USB Type-C to charge and sync the device.

Verdict

The LEAGOO S9 is priced at RM 699 which is a reasonable price for a mid-range device with a premium aesthetic design and solid built. There are a lot of budget Android phones out there that followed the notch display bandwagon like vivo Y81, HUAWEI nova 3e and ASUS ZenFone 5.

Design – 8/10
Build – 7/10
Performance – 5/10
Camera – 5/10
Battery – 6/10
Value – 8/10

Overall – 6.8

You can purchase the LEAGOO S9 now over Shopee Malaysia for RM 699 and receive a smartwatch worth RM 199.

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